Tyred of Hearing About Red Light Jumping?

Edit: Looks like I didn't notice the ahead only filter lights. Oops! It may not have been a red light after all. Oh well. I'll leave this here as a sign of my stupidity. :-)



This is not about the Nice Way Code (NWC). Honest! It is about an advert, but it's not about that now infamous NWC advert that suggests that it's only cyclists that run red light. So please don't flick to another web page, as I understand that we are all NWC fatigued.

This is about a completely different red light jumping advert, one that you might not expect....

YouTube makes its money by selling adverts. Companies make adverts and then pay YouTube (Google) money to place adverts at the start of videos made by other people. It's quite  money maker for Google I understand. Of course, the people who make the YouTube videos get a very small slice of the pie for allowing the videos to be there, so everyone is happy.

It's even smarter than that though. The advertising videos are placed on YouTube videos with related content. The idea is, if you're watching a video about fridges (for example it could be an advert for this really cool fridge), then an advert for a fridge at the start of that video is more likely to result in a converted sale.

All good.

Of course the system isn't perfect. Sometimes it links the wrong videos with the wrong content. I personally find it amusing when car adverts are placed at the start of my videos, especially when the adverts that show cars swooping through winding Californian empty roads, where the sun is shining and there are no damn cyclists holding them up. I love it especially when the advert is at the start of my filtering videos.

Anyway, I digress....

Yesterday, when looking at some comments on one of my videos the following advert started up at the beginning.

Ok, so this one isn't actually advertising a car, it is advertising car tyres, but the principle is the same. Sweeping road, swooping through.......oh wait....it's not all California. At least from 25 seconds onwards it's not all California. In fact some of it is in London!

The advert makers have been smart though. They've managed to avoid the London congestion long enough to make a video. They have even managed to make it look swooping. OK, they had to speed the footage up considerably to make it look swooping, but, you know what, if we could all manage to drive around at x5 even Glasgow might look swooping.

But wait!!

Something is very amiss with this advert. Very amiss, and I'm quite chuffed I spotted it in my first watch through. Did you see it? No?

Ok then, go back to the video and look closely at the section from about 40 seconds until about 47 seconds. Have you seen it now?

Whomever was filming this sequence for YOKOHAMA appears to have ran a red light. Go on, look again!

Yes, the car, and we have to assume that this is a car, as it is an advert for a car tyre after all, went straight through a red light that we can see other traffic stopped at. It looks like they might, just might be slowing down for the second set, but it cuts before they reach that set so we will never know.

Hmmmm. Perhaps as the NWC suggests (sorry I promised not to mention that didn't I?), it wasn't filmed from a car and was filmed from a bike.

It's certainly possible, though the footage does look pretty smooth (bike footage tends to be a bit bumpier), the camera is keeping up with traffic (bikes can never do that....can they?!) the camera is in the middle of the lane (bikes aren't supposed to do that.....are they?!)....oh and in some shots you can actually see the shadow of the car.

It'll be a car then.

So well done, Yokohama (a make that I had never heard of until today and will never buy), not only does your advert suggest that your tyres are so damn good that you just don't want to stop at red lights, and that they are probably grippy enough to help you outrun the police if they happened to see you do it, but you've dispelled the myth that it's only cyclists who run red lights.

I wonder if this advert was produced by the same advertising agency as the NWC.....